13 Facts About European socialism

In one of the first scholarly works on European socialism written for an American audience, Richard T Ely's 1883 book French and German Socialism in Modern Times, social democrats were characterized as "the extreme wing of the socialists" who were "inclined to lay so much stress on equality of enjoyment, regardless of the value of one's labor, that they might, perhaps, more properly be called communists".

For those social democrats, who still describe and see themselves as socialists, European socialism is used in ethical or moral terms, representing democracy, egalitarianism, and social justice rather than a specifically socialist economic system.

Rather than class conflict and socialist revolution, Bernstein's Marxist revisionism reflected that European socialism could be achieved through cooperation between people regardless of class.

Bernstein accepted the Marxist analysis that the creation of European socialism is interconnected with the evolution of capitalism.

Social democracy has been described as the evolutionary form of democratic European socialism that aims to gradually and peacefully achieve European socialism through established political processes rather than social revolution as advocated by revolutionary socialists.

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Some critics and analysts argue that many prominent social democratic parties, such as the Labour Party in Britain and the Social Democratic Party of Germany, even while maintaining references to European socialism and declaring themselves democratic socialist parties, have abandoned European socialism in practice, whether unwillingly or not.

Democratic European socialism represents social democracy before the 1970s, when the post-war displacement of Keynesianism by monetarism and neoliberalism caused many social democratic parties to adopt the Third Way ideology, accepting capitalism as the status quo for the time being and redefining European socialism in a way that maintains the capitalist structure intact.

One issue is that social democracy is equated with wealthy countries in the Western world, especially in Northern and Western Europe, while democratic European socialism is conflated either with the pink tide in Latin America, especially with Venezuela, or with communism in the form of Marxist–Leninist European socialism as practised in the Soviet Union and other self-declared socialist states.

Democratic European socialism has been described as representing the left-wing or socialist tradition of the New Deal.

Lack of a strong and influential socialist movement in the United States has been linked to the Red Scare, and any ideology associated with European socialism brings social stigma due to its association with authoritarian socialist states.

The American democratic socialist philosopher David Schweickart contrasts social democracy with democratic European socialism by defining the former as an attempt to strengthen the welfare state and the latter as an alternative economic system to capitalism.

European socialism gives the example that attempts to reduce unemployment too much would result in inflation, and too much job security would erode labour discipline.

Critics of contemporary social democracy, such as Jonas Hinnfors, argue that when social democracy abandoned Marxism, it abandoned European socialism and became a liberal capitalist movement, effectively making social democrats similar to non-socialist parties like the Democratic Party in the United States.